The ordeal of owning a rental house will soon be over.

My brother and I have owned our family homestead for years, but have only controlled it since my dad went into a nursing home.  My dad is dead now, and the house has become much more costly for us to own.  So we decided to sell it, rather than take the risk of having a bad tenant move in.

The house holds a lot of memories for us.  Both of us spent our formative years in that house.  And it'll be a sad day when we sign the house over to its new owners.  For a house built in 1941, it still has good bones, and the new owners will only be the third family to own the house.

My parents bought the house because it was walking distance to a bus that would take us to the subway station, and still be outside NYC limits.  Their children could get a good suburban in a suburban school, instead of a mediocre (or worse) education one would get in NYC schools.  (And they were right, given how NYC debased the quality of its education in order to allow certain groups to "earn" a diploma without having to meet all the former requirements for that diploma.)  

I grew up in good times, in a prosperous post-war America that was at the top of its game.  Anyone who wanted a job that paid well enough to support a family could have one.  Anyone with a decent education could make it to the top of business - if they knew how to "play the game" and were members of the right group.  America was far from perfect.  But it was a good time for people like me to be alive - unless we were among the persecuted minorities.

My dad had some college (from what I remember), but he never had use of it.  Instead, he became a salesman of machine tools.  When manufacturing died in NYC (this was before Amazon), he couldn't retool to sell another type of product.  There were too many different customers with whom he'd have to build new relationships.  So, he retired early.  When I took my first computer job, I earned more than he did.  I could have afforded a house like his with a few years of saving.  But I took a different path.  I bought only the living space I needed - a one bedroom apartment.  And, that would be the only space I would ever need, as children were not in my future.

When my brother and I inherited the house outright, we rented it out for a while.  And when our tenant left, we tried to fix it up and rent it out.  But it made more sense to sell.  Soon, the day will come, and we will leave that house forever with only our memories to show for it.
 

Earworms - a short post

 

Above is the corn ear worm.  It has nothing to do with today's post, save for the idea of something that gets stuck in your head and keeps repeating like a broken record.

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For the past few days, an old tune has gotten stuck in my head.  No, it is not from a TV advertisement.  Instead, it is from a tune regularly modified and played on a TV show from my youth.  You may have heard it yourself: Pfft, you were gone.  The Hee Haw show ran from 1969 to 1992, and it got good ratings - even in cities such as New York and Los Angeles.  And "Pfft," became an earworm that often comes and goes in my head due to its pleasant silliness.  But "Pfft" is not the only earworm I've had to deal with.  For a long while, the jingle for the Radio City Christmas Show was stuck in my head, and I hated it. Other tunes have gotten stuck there, and I didn't mind them so much, as they provided a sort of rhythm that kept my mind moving.  

What is it about earworms that make them so infectious?  I feel, like others, that they trigger other memories.  In my case, "Pfft" triggers happy feelings from childhood without directly triggering the memories that caused those feelings.  Television was an escape from an unhappy childhood, and "Pfft" was indicative of the things that made me smile way back when.

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Given the nature of earworms, a thought came to mind.  What would happen if a therapist could both find and use earworms to evoke feelings in a person undergoing therapy?  Could this be a helpful tool in treatment?  I'd love to be able to talk about this with the therapist who treated me years ago, as it would be an interesting discussion for sure....